February Roundup

We’ve released Orbit for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS last year and are now focusing on growing our userbase, improving the apps, and adding more features. Over the next few months, we’ll run a lot of experiments both on the product and marketing side. So we thought this is a great time to get started documenting and sharing some more of our numbers!

The idea behind this is both for ourselves to get a good month-over-month overview of how things are going, to help us reflect on what works and what doesn’t work, as well as to share our journey and (hopefully) provide a good reference for other people who are building their own products.

In this first article, we’ll look at our numbers over the lifetime of Orbit (since the launch in June 2020), as well as our numbers for February. In the following posts, we’ll also include some month-over-month comparisons and trends.

So, let’s jump right in!

App Store, Users, and Sales

Alright, so these numbers look a bit… odd. Our Impressions, Page Views, and Download numbers look extremely high in comparison to our total user accounts. This is because we’ve been lucky to be featured on the App Store several times. Most of these features have been in lists like “Apps and Games We Love Right Now”, “Updated for Big Sur”, and “Add Widgets to Your Home Screen”, this means that our app was shown to a broad range of users, some who might need a time tracking & invoicing app, but many who probably do not. This skewed our numbers to be pretty high, and created a lot of visibility, but not that high conversion rate. We’re totally fine with this, but I wanted to point it out since this probably won’t be our usual impression-to-user-accounts ratio.

Admittedly, our subscription flow wasn’t up to scratch until late last year either. Just as a reference, here’s our old and our current subscription screen:

Old subscription screen	New subscription screen

Subscriptions

Kai and I had a lot of things going on last month and didn’t spend as much time on Orbit (both on the product and on the marketing efforts). We saw fewer people starting a new trial this month than usual and, as a result, our numbers are lower than the previous months. Since then, we’ve finished up and released new updates for both the macOS and iOS app and have started working on some other new exciting features. Hopefully this will help our March numbers 🤞

Overall, our active subscriptions have been hovering at around 100 for the last few months. We’re excited to have made it to this point and it’s encouraging to see other people wanting to use Orbit. However, this is still far away from where we’d like our subscriber numbers to be and we have plans to get us closer to our goal.

At the moment, a user requires a subscription to use the app, and even though we offer a free weekly trial, we’ve heard from a lot of potential users that they’re reluctant to start an auto-renewing trial. We have a few things planned to remove this friction. We’re currently looking at different ways that would allow users to try the app, without activating a trial (we’ll share more on this soon).

Source of Downloads

Since we haven’t done that much marketing outside of the App Store, these numbers pretty much align with what we would expect. It will be interesting to see what impact our own marketing efforts have on the Web Referrer percentage over the next few months.

Marketing Numbers

Current Ad

These numbers are not that exciting this month, but we are starting to experiment more with marketing so I thought I’d include our spendings for February here as a reference for future articles.

Wrap-up

That wraps up our first roundup article, thank you so much for taking the time to read through it! Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any thoughts or feedback, I’d love to hear from you.